Developments in speech recognition technologies support “natural language” type interactions between automated systems and customers. A natural language interaction allows a customer to speak naturally, and a voice recognition system can react in response to the customer's request. One of the applications of natural language is in speech recognition with automatic call routing (ACR). A goal of an ACR application is to determine why a customer is calling a service center and to route the customer to an appropriate human operator or destination system for servicing a customer request. Speech recognition technology generally allows an ACR application to recognize natural language statements so that the application does not have to rely on a menu system. This allows the customer to state the purpose of their call “in their own words.”
In order for an ACR application to properly route calls, the ACR system attempts to interpret the intent of the customer call, identify the intent of the customer call, and then identify a correct routing destination. Identification of all possible caller requests is a time intensive and extensive phase of development because all call types are typically not known prior to ACR application development.
One significant problem that occurs in ACR systems is that speech recognition systems cannot understand all callers all of the time. When the speech recognition system partially understands or misunderstands the callers' goals, significant problems can result. Further, even in touch-tone ACR systems the caller can depress the wrong buttons and get routed to a wrong location. When a caller gets routed to an unintended destination, the caller often hangs up and retries the call. Another common problem occurs when a caller gets “caught” or “trapped” in a menu that does not provide an acceptable selection to exit the menu. Trapping a caller leads to an abandoned call. A huge volume of calls is often handled by a call routing system and even if a small percentage of calls are abandoned, the costs associated with abandoned calls are significant.
In addition, unsuccessful call routing results in caller dissatisfaction. Accordingly, there is a need for an improved method and system of routing calls.